Description:While this course is a workshop, in which student work is the primary focus, we also devote a significant amount of time to outside readings. The readings for this semester’s workshop focus on the intersection of the political and the personal. When poets look at the bigness and the smallness, the chaos and the clarity of today’s world, focusing on the interior experiences of an individual speaker, the traditional province of the lyric poem, can seem too limited. American poets have turned toward political subjects as a way of enlarging their vision and defining what it means to live in their country at this given historical moment. In this course, we look at poems that approach the political and the national in a variety of ways. Assignments encourage students to open their poems to the interconnectedness of the public and the personal. Our readings include poems and essays by John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Cathy Park Hong, Ann Lauterbach, Patricia Lockwood, Rachel Loden, Jennifer Moxley, Frank O’Hara, Claudia Rankine, David Trinidad, Catherine Wagner, Susan Wheeler, and others. This Writing & Democracy course is open to all undergraduate students at The New School.